Sunday, March 23, 2014

Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit - Part Two

There
is another alleged MJ-12 document that suffers from many of the same problems
as the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary and this is the Majestic Twelve
Project, Annual Report which is believed to have been created during the summer
of 1952. This is another of the documents provided by Timothy Cooper through
his source of Thomas Cantwheel, that unidentified man who claimed to have been
on the inside of UFO crashes investigations and with the Majestic Twelve or
some such.

These
are the conclusions from a larger document which rehashes some of the
information from other documents and adds to the knowledge that we have been
told is highly classified. It is clear from the document that, “…no country on
this earth has the means and the security of its resources to produce such
[meaning an interplanetary craft].”

It
is noted that “The occupants of these planform vehicles are, in most respects,
human or human-like. Autopsies, so far indicate, that these beings share the
same biological needs as humans.”

One
of the things that would become important in understanding the veracity of the
document said, “The ATIC Interrogation Reports, numbered 1 to 93 (the last
dated December, 1950), present significant information on a broad variety of
subjects and areas where witnesses were obtained subsequent to the post-1947
incident. The un-published documents consolidate records of interrogation
derived from the accumulated reports of interviews of selected witnesses from
New Mexico and military personnel involved in removal of evidence.”

It
is after Section P labeled as “Government Policy of Control and Denial,” a list
of statements about all these events is found. For example, it said, “The
Panel’s review of the AEC and AFSWP investigation of Site L-1 and the Air Force
Site L-2, has led the Panel to conclude that the objects under study, are the
result of a high altitude ejection of a [sic] escape cylinder from a fatal
mid-air collision of two unidentified circular planform aircraft of
interplanetary nature.”

As
had been seen in the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary, there are the
coordinates for L-2 [which is why the two documents can be tied together] and
they are written in the same weird format, meaning “Lat. 33-40-31, Long.
106-28-29.… this site yielded the most material for analysis.”

We
learn that Site L-2 is associated with Site L-1, again for which no coordinates
are provided, which also seems strange. The descriptions of both sites seem to
match to some degree and that “impact and the debris pattern… and debris
pattern suggests that the craft hit the ground at a sharp angle and continued
to remain airborne until coming to rest at Site L-2.”

Then
comes a statement that turns part of this upside down. According to the
document “The second craft that impacted at Site L-3, provided very little
evidence that it too was similar in design, so the impact was vertical in
nature and at very high speed. It is believed that the debris discovered on 2
July 1947, by a local rancher was the result of a mid-air collision with an
X-plane from HAFB [Holloman Air Force Base]; another unidentified object; or
possibly collided with both…”

According
to the document, “There were five recovered bodies, two of which were found in
a severely damaged escape cylinder, and the remaining three were found some
distance away from the cylinder. All five appeared to have suffered from sudden
decompression and heat suffication [sic] (recovery and autopsies of the
occupants are covered in detail in a separate study GRAY SUIT within Projects
612 and 621…”

Later,
it is noted that tissue samples from the contamination of four technicians
involved in the recovery were being held at Fort Detrick, MD.

And
to make matters worse, there is the note, “Detection of a high altitude
explosion was recorded by a Project MOGUL constant level balloon on 4 July
1947.”

At
another point it said, “On 6 December 1950, MAJCOM-4 alerts MAJCOM-1 of a
breach in DEW Greenland of a UFO on a south-westerly course. HQ IPU alerted and
dispatched a scientific team to El Indio-Guerrero on the Texas-Mexico border.
MAJCOM-4 orders a recovery team from Project Stork and MOON DUST to crash
site…”

But
here’s the problem with those things mentioned above. They are out of place.
They shouldn’t be in this document because they didn’t exist at the time it was
supposedly written. Or other, better information has superseded it. Newer
information has shown where the older data are wrong. For example, the document
states that “…ATIC Interrogation Reports, numbered 1 to 93 (the last dated
December, 1950), present significant information on a broad variety of
subjects…” But, according to Brad Sparks, ATIC wasn’t formed until May 1951 and
therefore could not issue a series of reports before its existence.

Although
there is the discussion about some sort of mid-air collision, the best evidence
today is that there was a single craft that scattered its debris over three
sites, all of them between Corona, New Mexico and Roswell. There is no evidence
of a crash near the Trinity Site, other than in the MJ-12 documents. While an
argument can be made that the information we have today does not completely
eliminate the collision scenario, it can also be argued that it is out of date
information that was the current thinking by some in the mid-1990s. That dates
the creation of the document to that time.

Then,
unlike the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary, this document adds a third
site. This might be an attempt to account for the later information coming from
UFO researchers in the 1990s. Realizing that something else had come down
between the Brazel ranch debris field and Roswell, the forger added this new
detail to conform to the new and better information. As an aside, this
information should have appeared in the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary,
since it would have been available in July 1947. This all, of course, is
indicative of a hoax rather than the truth.

Worse
still, is the suggestion that Mack Brazel had found the debris field on July 2.
It has been claimed by some that the crash took place either late on July 2 or
early on July 3. Brazel found the debris on July 3 or 4, according to some of
the scenarios, but none of them include finding debris as early as July 2.

The
idea of a collision between an experimental aircraft out of Holloman is not
borne out by research. Air Force investigation showed that no military
aircraft, either in the regular inventory or in the experimental stages
disappeared in early July 1947. Those on the inside of these organizations,
with the clearances necessary, would know this. They might speculate about a
collision with an unknown object but they would know that it was not an
aircraft of any type.

We
move into trivia again. Holloman Air Force Base was, in fact, the Alamogordo
Army Air Field in 1947, but I suppose you could argue that someone writing
about this in 1952 would use the current name of the air field rather than the
older name.

Almost
the same could be said about the tissue samples were sent to Fort Detrick. The
problem here is that Fort Detrick was Camp Detrick in 1952. The new designation
would not be made until some four years after the document was allegedly
written. Yes, you could say that it is a minor mistake that might have been
made by someone who was not fully aware of how the Army designated their
installations. Even someone inside the Army might not understand this. The
question to be asked is how many of these sorts of errors are allowed before it
becomes clear that the document was not written by an insider?

Part
of that answer is found in the next statement about a MOGUL balloon detecting
the collision or explosion on a July 4. First, there was no July 4 MOGUL flight
and there is no indication that any sort of explosion detected by MOGUL. This
is not to mention that it contradicts the other information suggesting that
Brazel found the debris on July 2. If the alleged detonation was detected by
the July 4 flight, then how is it linked to an event that happened two days
before it was launched?

But
it is the next paragraph that proves the document a hoax. It begins with a date
of December 6, 1950, and claims that the UFO breeched the DEW in Greenland. The
problem is that the DEW line didn’t exist in 1950 and according to Brad Sparks
the name wasn’t even “coined until the MIT Project Lincoln Summer Study Group
report of September 1952. The DEW line was not started until 1954.”

Even
worse, according to the document, “HQ IPU alerted and dispatched a scientific
team to El Indio-Guerrero on the Texas-Mexico border.” This is based on the
testimony of Robert Willingham, who claimed that as a high-ranking Air Force
officer and fighter pilot, he had seen the crash. The trouble is that
Willingham was neither an officer nor a fighter pilot and his story has been
discredited. It would seem that a tale, invented in the 1960s by Willingham and
that has undergone several revisions since then, would not appear in an
authentic document created more than a decade before Willingham made his first
claim.

Finally,
we know that Project Stork was the analysis done by Battelle and had nothing to
do with crash retrievals. Although it began early enough to be mentioned in
this document, it is clear that the author didn’t know what Project Stork was.

Attached
to this is the mention of the MOON DUST team but this is a real problem.
According to documents that I located in the Project Blue Book files and a
letter dated December 12, 1957, MOON DUST began in the fall of 1957. In other
words, it would not exist for five years and there is no way for it to deploy a
team in 1950.

To
summarize (which is to say, let’s beat this dead horse), this document is
filled with internal contradictions, it is filled with inaccurate information,
and it contains information that would be correct if the programs, units and
projects actually existed in 1952. While it might be argued that this is a
draft (which would have been destroyed when the final draft was completed) so
that you might expect the typos, misnamed military organizations, and some
inaccurate information, all of which would be corrected in the final draft,
there is no way to explain the predictions for the future. There is no way for the author to know the DEW
line would be created two years in the future, would know that it would be
called the DEW line before the name was coined, and no way to know that MOON
DUST would be created some five years later. These, to me, are the fatal flaws.

For
those interested, there are more examples of this in the document. I just
didn’t bother to enumerate all of them. And yes, I know that the comment will
be made that the way to discredit a leak of classified information is to pump
false information into it so no one knows what is accurate, what is false, and
the whole thing is rejected. But that isn’t the point here. These documents
just appeared in Timothy Cooper’s mail box and the trail basically ends there.

Without
a provenance, without an eyewitness, without anything to allow us to validate
the documents, there is but one sane course. Ignore them. Reject them. Move our
research efforts into another arena. Unfortunately, the facts about this
document are not enough to remove it from the case. Instead it is considered
highly reliable by some in the UFO community.

There
is one other thing to be said. During all my investigations into the MJ-12
documents, regardless of source, Stan Friedman, Dr. Robert Wood and Ryan Wood,
have answered most of my email questions. All are aware of my personal belief
in MJ-12 but they do respond and I appreciate that. It would be simple for them
to ignore my questions but they don’t. I thank them for putting up with my
questions.

7 comments:

In your last paragraph you wrote "my personal belief in MJ-12". I presume you meant "disbelief".

I wonder how much time & energy should be spent on such close examinations of 'documents' these days.

The advent of the internet and all the social and special interest groups which proliferate now seem to meake it easier than ever to fabricate official documents. We shall be deluged with them. The perpetrators can always find an enthusiastic audience, even if it is a relatively small one.

And the conspiracy proponents will be ever present, particularly in the USA.

Alas for the future of real ufology! Having said that, perhaps abductology is, or seems to be, on the decline.

Whilst some of the detailed errors in the document are the sort of thing that could creep in by accident others (e.g. the timing related to the DEW line and the odd use of Project Stork in this context) are very amateurish.

Whilst any 'leaked' document must inevitably be approached with suspicion I can't agree that they shouldn't be examined. The skills of a historian are required as well as more forensic expertise in some cases.

These things usually seem to have merely been a distraction from more robust lines of evidence but may conceivably be useful if a document raises something that might in principle be tested further (e.g. through FOIA etc.)

Does anyone actually make any money out a document like this? It looks so amateurish I doubt it can fall into the same category as some of the MJ-12 material. Perhaps I don't frequent the 'right' fringe events and publications but it seems an odd pastime to me, putting stuff like that together.

It is not money that motivates the fabricators - not usually anyway. I doubt that the MJ-12 forger(s) made much dosh. It is the personal satisfaction of knowing, and seeing, a certain section of the UFO fraternity discussing and devoting their time to such things. There is always a captive audience, even if only a small one. But it is there and always will be.

The true financial gain is small - if anything. But you do get some brief publicity.

It is the thrill of seeing certain portions of the public taking these things seriously. Even the odd scientist might, possibly, perk up and take notice. What then?